The President's Message

I have been privileged recently to see the kind of innovative thinking our organization is devoted to, in action. The experience came as I observed the team members of Project Service Connector come together for the first time. The project is a collaborative effort of Saskatchewan municipalities, researchers, and staff members of Communities of Tomorrow. Its mandate is to find new and more efficient ways of dealing with the thousands of municipal water service connection replacements that must be done every year in our province.

We put together this working group and contracted Conroy Ross Partners to design and facilitate a framework within which they can do their work. The entire project is detailed in a story in this month’s newsletter.

What was so impressive about watching this group go to work was the incredible cross-sectoral co-operation and collaboration. There are front line utility installation folks from the municipalities, as well as some of our best theoreticians in robotics and remote-sensing metrics, among others. This is a unique group who have accepted a challenge to innovate by working together. We look forward to the results of their work.

Communities of Tomorrow is using every means at its disposal to build connections between all of the players in Saskatchewan’s emerging innovative municipal infrastructure cluster. It is the inter-play between municipalities, industry, and researchers in the field that will yield the new products and services we will create in Saskatchewan and sell to the massive global infrastructure market.

We continue to reach out to new partners in these fields and to look for opportunities to share each other’s needs and innovative solutions.